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Four essential ingredients of an electrical power
system

Four essential ingredients of an electrical power system (photo credit: afconsult.com)

Electrical power system
Generally speaking, you must agree that electrical power system is a complex project consisting of the four main
ingredients. Now, let’s observe each ingridient in details:

1. Electricity supply
2. Transmission
3. Distribution
4. Loads

1. Electricity supply

All countries now have available some supplies of electricity to connected consumers. In many industrialised
countries a nationwide grid or distribution system is installed so that generating plant can be “pooled” through
interconnections to supply customers from industrial/factory complexes down to the smallest residential
consumer, perhaps with a single light or TV set.

As electrical energy is not easy to store, except by converting it to some other form of easily stored energy.

Example is water pumped to a higher reservoir where the generating plant output must always match
instantaneously the demand of the loads plus the losses (hopefully less than 10%) in transporting and delivering
demanded energy (units of kWh).

For many good reasons, most small consumers require their supply at a low voltage (230 V in Europe, 110V in USA
for example) whereas to keep losses low, electricity needs to be transmitted over any distance at a high voltage (400 kV in
Europe, up to 700 kV in US/Canada).

Generation, on the other hand, is most economically done at around 20 kV thereby requiring a step-up in
voltage to the transmission system and a step-down in voltage for distribution to the myriad of small (mainly
residential) consumers.
This transformation is readily done by high efficiency transformers which require, due to Faraday’s law, an
alternating voltage at 50 Hz in Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. and 60 Hz on the American continent. To keep
material costs to a minimum, transmission and distribution is best done using a 3-phase system but only a single-
phase supply is required by small consumers.

Large and intermediate consumers such as industrial processes, factories, large buildings and hospitals etc. are most
economically supplied at a higher voltage than to small consumers, at between 10 to 20 kV.

Consequently, many distribution systems consisting of step-down transformers, cable or overhead lines operate at
this voltage and only the final, comparatively short connections to individual small consumers, operate at 230V or
110 V, usually by tapping off from a 3-phase system.

Go back to power system ingridients list  ↑

2. Transmission

Part of a typical generation and transmission network is depicted as a single line diagram as in Figure 1. It should
be noted that generators are interconnected by a 3-phase system and it is essential that they run in
synchronism with each other. If a generator cannot remain in synchronism due to a fault, then it must be
disconnected by its circuit breaker otherwise the whole system could collapse.

In the figure, substations enable circuits to be switched and alternative routes are available if a circuit needs to be
withdrawn for repair or maintenance.
Distribution systems are fed from the high voltage network through step-down transformers and increasingly there
are smaller generators “embedded” in the distribution network adding to the combined energy output of the
synchronised system.

Figure 1 – Part of a typical generation and transmission network

In a deregulated electricity supply industry (ESI), the generators could be owned and operated by different utilities,
the transmission lines and substations owned by other investors and the supplies to the distribution systems
bought under contract to private distributors or suppliers.
Increasingly, for undersea connections or for connections between networks not in synchronism, high voltage
direct current using semiconductors as a rectifier one end and inverter the other is being used. Such connections
should be considered as alternatives to a.c. connections.

Go back to power system ingridients list  ↑

3. Distribution

Medium and low voltage distribution systems vary in their design and layout depending upon the locality being
served. In urban areas, where consumers are numerous and concentrated, an underground network with closely
spaced step-down transformer substations are installed sized to meet the maximum expected demand after taking
into account the average diversity of customer use.

Figure 2  depicts a typical urban network where each single line represents 3 phases contained within a single
under road cable.

Figure 2 – Typical arrangement of a supply to an urban network in UK

Because of the complexity of protecting the system if it was fully interconnected, it is usual to operate it as a radial
system fed from the primary substations but allowing circuits to be supplied by alternative connections if any
circuit is disconnected under fault or maintenance conditions.

For rural areas with sparsely sited consumers in farms or small villages, most supplies are stepped down by
small pole-mounted transformers as close to the consumer as possible fed from a radial circuit. Fuse rather
than relay operated circuit breaker protection is employed for cheapness and reclosing circuit breakers in the
primary substation ensure that supplies can be quickly restored to healthy circuits once a fuse has blown because
of a fault.
Figure 3  shows a typical rural
distribution system in which
section points allow manual
re-switching to restore
supplies after fuse
disconnection. Overhead lines,
either 3 phase or single phase,
is the norm thereby allowing
quick repair with a suitably
equipped crew.

Figure 3 – A typical
rural distribution
system at 11kV with
step-up and step-
down transformers,
the latter protected
by fuses

Go back to power system

ingridients list  ↑
 4.

Loads

Consumer demand in a power system is often called a “load” and, of course, it will vary from hour to hour,
day to day and season to season. Typical daily load curves aggregated over the whole England and Wales system
are shown in Figure 4.
As previously remarked, the total generator output must match this demand and this requires the generators to be
flexible.

In practice, to maintain as high an efficient output as possible generators wish to run at full output or be offline
so the system operator instructs plant to synchronise and desynchronise at pre-planned times worked out
by some economic scheduling algorithm.

At times when the demand is expected to fluctuate by 5% or so within minutes (as could happen in a countrywide
event when kettles or cookers are switched on/off in co-ordination by a TV programme) then a number of
generators, particularly those with quick response, will be scheduled.

If the demand curve of Figure 4  is plotted in descending order of magnitude as in Figure 5, the resulting diagram
depicts a duration curve. Over a year of operation this curve indicates the load factor at which various kinds of
generating plant can be expected to operate.

Figure 4 – NGC summer and winter demands for 1995/96 (not

weather corrected)
Normally the plant having the cheapest price per kWh would operate at base load and the peaking plant would
operate on very small load factor around the peak demand. Other plant, depending on its characteristics and
production costs, would be expected to run at the intermediate load factors, probably generating during the day
and shutting down at night (known as two shifting).

Figure 5 – Demand duration curve for typical winter demand

In interconnected systems or power pools where energy trading is allowed, the operation of the system is much
more complex. In this case, existing generating plant may find that it is unable to rely on base or intermediate load
operation and must be installed and run according to its contracted output portfolio rather than in any economic
sense.

Plant without sufficient contracts to sustain their operation could therefore be isolated and eventually shut
down, whereas newly installed plant with long term contracts could take its place.

The availability of long term contracts on both the fuel supply side and the output energy side is likely to be the
dominant feature of planning in the future.
Go back to power system ingridients list  ↑

Reference // Electrical Engineer’s Reference Book by M. A. Laughton CEng., FIEE and D. J. Warne CEng., FIEE (Purchase
hardcover from Amazon)

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About Author //
Edvard Csanyi

Edvard - Electrical engineer, programmer and founder of EEP. Highly specialized for
design of LV high power busbar trunking (<6300A) in power substations, buildings and
industry fascilities. Designing of LV/MV switchgears.Professional in AutoCAD
programming and web-design.Present on Google+

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